Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (229 mails)

[opensuse-project] Announcing openSUSE Tumbleweed project

There's been many discussions over the past years about a "rolling
update" version of openSUSE on lots of different mailing lists and in
person a different conferences.

So the time now is to stop talking about it, and actually trying to do
it :)

So, I'd like to propose "openSUSE Tumbleweed" a repo that is a rolling
updated version of openSUSE containing the latest "stable" versions of
packages for people to use.

To help clear up any questions about this, here are some answers to ones
that I have heard a lot recently when discussing this:

Q: How does this differ from Factory and the recently announced
Factory-Tested?
A: Factory always contains the bleeding edge versions of our packages
that the maintainers have created. Sometimes these packages don't
work well together and cause the machine to fail to boot (Hence the
need for Factory-Tested). Tumbleweed will contain "stable" versions
of these latest packages that have been deemed to "work" properly.

A good example of how Tumbleweed is different from Factory would be
to look at the kernel package today in Factory. It is 2.6.37-rc as
the goal is to have the final 2.6.37 release in the next 11.4
release. But, it is still under active development and not
recommended for some people who don't like reporting kernel bugs.
For this reason, Tumbleweed would track the stable kernel releases,
in this case, it would stay at 2.6.36 until the upstream kernel is
released in a "stable" format.

Q: What types of packages would be updated in Tumbleweed?
A: What do you want to see updated? Seriously, this is something that
anyone can request their packages to be updated. We will rely on the
maintainers of the packages to be the ones determining the "stable"
versions to be pushed into Tumbleweed.

This can help with projects that don't always line up their release
dates with existing openSUSE releases. If (for example) GNOME 3.0
comes out and is deemed "stable" 1 month after a openSUSE happens,
users would not have to wait 6 more months to use it in a semi-stable
form.

Q: But wait, can't you do this today on your own by just adding a bunch
of different repos to zypper and relying on that?
A: Yes, you can, but if my zypper repo list is any example, that gets
unwieldy (I seem to average about 12 per machine), and we don't want
to have every user be forced to do this on their own. Tumbleweed
would provide a single place for users that want to be on the
semi-bleeding edge of packages, to have it all in one place.

I'd like to do this "for real" after 11.4 is out, just due to the amount
of time it will take to get the workflow down properly, and due to some
other time constraints on my plate at the moment. I anticipate trying
this out to start with based on 11.3 but I don't guarantee it all
working properly right at the moment.